Ptolemy: the Geography

The Author:

Claudius Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician of the 2c A.D., whose exact dates we do not know, but who must apparently have worked in Alexandria between A.D. 127 and 148 since some of his astronomical observations are consistent with those dates.

(Thus the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The Geography itself also provides at least one clue, listing the Egyptian city of Antinoöpolis, founded in A.D. 130.)

Ptolemy's most famous works are the
Almagest, a 13‑book textbook of astronomy in which among many other things, he lays the foundations of modern trigonometry; the
Tetrabiblos, a compendium of astrology; and the Geography. He also wrote many other works centered on applied mathematics: astronomy, optics, music, etc.; a small Canon of Latitudes and Longitudes may be his as well: it is a sort of abridged version of the Geography, although the coördinates for certain places are not the same — manuscript transmission problems, maybe.

We may not have his dates, but a late 2c equivalent of the Tattler has come down to us in a not-too‑damaged papyrus used as cartonnage for a collection of cat mummies found at Deir-at‑Tahir in the Thebaid, giving us some presumably unreliable if spicy details of his personal life. Found in 1931, the account, couched in the form of an Alexandrian romance, was used in 1952 as the basis for "The Traveling Seer of Alexandria", a B-grade movie with would you believe it? Ava Gardner in the title rôle.

No, you shouldn't believe any of that last paragraph, but I couldn't resist. It is sad that, as with so many figures of Antiquity, we know next to nothing about the man himself. For a good summary of his work, though, try
Ptolemy, the Man; and
Historical Astrology In Egypt
for a good page focusing mostly on his astrological work, even if the page refers to him as "dabbling" in geography. . . For an attempt to reconstruct what he actually looked like, based on medieval portraits (an enterprise which I view as altogether quixotic), see this excellent website:
Iconography of Ptolemy's Portrait.

The Text:

This is another useful text that didn't seem to be on the Web when I started getting interested in it. The bare essentials: this is, as occasionally modified by me, a transcript of a Dover edition, first published in 1991, itself an unabridged republication of a public domain work, originally published in 1932 by The New York Public Library, N.Y. in an edition limited to 250 copies, with the title

Geography of Claudius Ptolemy

I am compelled to add right away what I very quickly discovered: that the edition, in English translation with no original-language text, is hardly a scholarly one, which is sad, since I know of no other English translation. Anyway, it was clearly not proofread and introduces many errors of its own into the already unreliable manuscript tradition. Although Prof. Stevenson doesn't breathe a word, either in his introduction or anywhere else, of exactly what it was that he translated — for very good reasons, I fear — his English version seems to be a translation of no Greek original, but at least in part of the Latin translation in Karl Müller's magisterial 1883 edition.

And apparently I'm not alone in my disappointment. Aubrey Diller, in "Review of 'Geography of Claudius Ptolemy', translated into English and edited by Edward Luther Stevenson (1932)," ISIS 22 (1934):533‑39, analyzes the entire mess point by point, and states on p538: "The translation is a complete failure." (A big thank you to Gregory McIntosh, a historian of cartography, for this information; and seven years after his heads‑up,
I finally put the full review onsite.)

Anyway, the placename readings in Vat. lat. 3810 are not the best, and the English translation is both inconsistent and in spots downright inane.

After wrestling with it for several years, sometime around 2000 I finally decided to abandon this transcription: the Stevenson edition is just too flawed to be worth putting online, although I'm leaving up what I have. If you are doing serious research, you should not base any of it on this edition, nor should you cite it, at the risk of immediately vitiating your work in the mind of anyone competent to judge.

I now find, in May 2017, nearly twenty years after I started this project, that
Karl Müller's edition is finally online
— although with one flaw: searches for the Greek text return nothing, neither within the book nor on the Web, making it impractical and near-invisible.

Still, that makes it official: my transcription of the Stevenson edition is completely useless, and I did well to abandon it.

The Maps:

Ptolemy's Geography was what we would now call an atlas, the core of which were of course the maps, referred to in the text and table of contents below as "Fifth Map of Europe", "Third Map of Asia", etc. The manual copying of maps is fiendish work, however, and considerably less reliable than that of text — Ptolemy was well aware of this (Book I, Chapter 18) — and his maps have consequently disappeared: nothing remains but the index. Recognizing that the maps would be a sticking point, Ptolemy also suggested that people replot his data, and a good section of Book I of the Geography offers advice on how to draw the maps.

Ptolemy's coördinates are in degrees and minutes (360 degrees to a circle, 60 minutes to a degree), just like our own. His North-South coördinates (latitudes) are measured like our own from the Equator. His East-West coördinates (longitudes) are measured eastward from a point somewhere W of the westernmost point he catalogues in the Geography, traditionally read as "east of the Blessed Isles": for that reason, in this Web edition I indicated latitudes with the familiar degree sign (e.g., 5°00N), but his longitudes with an asterisk instead (e.g., 25*00).

Various people at various times have redrawn the maps from the coördinates given in the work: the map appended to Prof. Stevenson's edition, for example, is a medieval version or copy of just such a replot, but both Planudes and Karl Müller have done it as well. Thus, in undertaking this Web edition at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, I found myself very moved to be, and in good company at that, following Claudius Ptolemy's instructions using instruments he would never have dreamt of: every once in a while, this would hit me for a few seconds and make the unspeakably tedious cartographic reproduction much easier.

A couple of technical details about my own maps:

I found it convenient to plot a separate map for each of Ptolemy's chapters: they are usually submaps of the original maps. For example, Ptolemy's First Map of Europe covered both Ireland and Britain; but I have two separate maps, one to go with the chapter on Ireland, the other to go with the chapter on Britain — and so forth.

The projection I used consists of a digital mapping of both longitude and latitude at the same "scale" of so many pixels per interval of 5 minutes of arc. Like any good geographer, Ptolemy would be horrified of course, since such a mapping distorts shapes and distances the further you go from the equator. In reading my maps, you should be careful not to make assumptions about distances, please, especially between places widely separated in longitude; and to remember that the distortion of shapes, while pretty much negligible over small areas such as Pontus & Bithynia, is major over large ones such as India. Ptolemy himself used a considerably more sophisticated projection. (I believe all my maps to be portions of a single cylindrical projection of Ptolemy's globe, with the Equator as the reference latitude; but I'm still checking that.)

Mechanics out of the way, it's useful to point out to the beginning student of Ptolemy that the ancient geographer makes many errors (almost certainly further compounded by scribal transcription errors), and that in our time endless ingenuity has been expended on diagnosing them, correcting them, emending the text, etc.: in shelves full of books — literally, in one good library I saw several yards' worth — to which now a passel of webpages has been added; and though the adherents of these widely varying opinions occasionally propound them with the greatest certitude, none of them is to be trusted, probably. If you write me with your own theory, I'll read it, but that's it: I dislike stress, and won't jump into any of this.